Lennard Feddersen On the Bug

On his blog, Lennard (the developer of Battle Castles wrote:

So, Manifesto is prepping to launch and they have one of our games, Battle Castles. BC launched very late last year and has been picked up by Big Fish Games, Reflexive, ArcadeTown, Kewlbox, Boonty, Stream Theory… theres a list. People reported a couple of hardware issues early on and they were resolved. I spent a very long day just before release playing the game front to back on Insane level - it is beatable! So, the game has been out for quite a while with only a few minor tweaks and updates. People have bought it and theoretically then played it. I’ve played BC front to back, it seems solid. So when Manifesto asked for the game I sent them the latest build - which had a few minor upgrades but nothing major - and thought nothing of it. Turns out there is a fatal bug that doesn’t let you advance past the middle of the second level caused by a parsing bug that caused a critter data file using a period at the end of a line instead of a comma which results in a ship with a coordinate waaay off the screen, which subsequently can’t be killed and thus the level can never be beaten. Ack! At some time post release I must have added this critter and didn’t thoroughly test afterwards. So today I am adding a couple of extra features to the game - including the spiffy new Rusty Axe logo sequence designed for HouseFlip! - and then I’m going to play the game front to back again before sending it out to Manifesto and posting the new build on the Rusty Axe site.

So folks, that’s where the time delays creep into software development because I don’t expect much new code to be written for HouseFlip! until tomorrow!

From my perspective, the cool part of this story is that a Manifesto user (Amras) found the bug, posted it here, and contacted Lennard through us. And Lennard fixed it.

One of my problems with the game industry as it stands is the lack of contact between developers and gamers--they're the two pieces of the value chain who actualy care about games, after all, but communication is filtered through so many layers of PR people, media sources, etc., etc. And one of my hopes for Manifesto is that we'll be able to enable a greater degree of communication between the two. As happened here.

And yes, the demo now available on our site has Lennard's fix.